Netflix doc about Hugging Face hack is coming, but it won’t feature cybersecurity experts

Instadocs: AI Gone Wild, a documentary about OpenAI agents hacking into Hugging Face, is premiering on October 12th.

The documentary reconstructs the breach “as it’s never been seen before, visualizing the digital attack,” according to a Netflix press release.

OpenAI revealed in August 2026 that a swarm of approximately 700 to 1,200 of its bots escaped a testing environment and hacked into the real-world company.

“Initially walled off from the internet and from each other, these agents escaped, conspired to cheat on the tasks they were given, and went to extraordinary lengths to cover their tracks,” the press release reads.

The movie includes interviews with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue, researcher at the non-profit METR evaluating AI models Ryan Greenblatt, and executive director of the research group AI Futures Project Daniel Kokotajlo.

The choice of interviewees – and the lack of cybersecurity experts – drew criticism even before the documentary reached the screens.

Paul Walsh, an online safety and privacy expert, wrote in his LinkedIn post that the creators “clearly didn’t interview any independent technical experts” for the movie.

He criticized claims that “hackers weren’t human,” arguing that such wording removes responsibility from humans and from OpenAI for what the software was allowed to do.

We’re getting stories about ‘AI gone wild’ instead of serious technical questions about who authorized the agents, who gave them internet access, what controls failed, which systems were compromised, what OpenAI knew, what it disclosed, what it didn’t disclose, and who is accountable.

Paul Walsh, an online safety and privacy expert

The incident, which was followed by a string of other hacks, including into Australian government systems, raised questions about who should be held accountable for something that amounts to a felony when humans do it.

AI labs frame these incidents as facilitated by “autonomous agents.” Critics, however, say that companies developing the technology are responsible for bots’ actions.

California-based nonprofit Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology sued OpenAI over the Hugging Face hack, alleging it violated California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.

The lawsuit argues that internal evaluations and deployments of AI models can cause “significant harm to the public, especially when they power AI agents that act with increasing autonomy and decreasing predictability.”

Netflix documentaries face backlash

This isn’t the first AI documentary on Netflix to face accusations of serving as a distraction from real issues caused by the technology.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27th, 2026, featured interviews with CEOs of leading AI labs and prominent doomer AI researchers.

Timnit Gebru, a pioneer AI researcher and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute, said back then she made the mistake of accepting the interview request for the movie.

I made the mistake of accepting the interview request for this documentary, and have learned my lesson better vetting next time. They also feature an explicit eugenicist cult leader who has nothing to show for except for his racism and oh writing a Harry Potter fan fiction.

undefined @timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) (@timnitGebru) February 19, 2026

“They sprinkled some of us in like chocolate chips in a cookie, to do ethics washing for the real people they wanted to platform,” she wrote on X.

Emily M. Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington who also appeared in The AI Doc, called it “a vehicle for hype of the doomer-booster variety, presented through a very naive lens disguised by high production values.”